About collections

The Shoah History Department collects and makes available various materials on the history of the "final solution of the Jewish question" in Bohemia and Moravia. Those include archival collections Terezín (Theresienstadt), Documents of persecution (relating to persecution of Bohemian and Moravian Jews outside of Terezín) and a large amount of material of personal or family character. The Department further provides access to the collection of more than one thousand interviews with Holocaust survivors and to a new oral history collection on the life of Jews in post-WWII Czechoslovakia. A subsection of the Photo Collection related to the WWII is also taken care off here.

The archive of the Department is fully digitised and following a detailed control will be made available online. Currently, mainly an extensive collection of documents about Jews in Ostrava and a prevailing part of the Terezín (Theresienstadt) collection are published online.

The Photo Archive collects and takes care of photos related mainly to the history and activities of the Jewish Museum in Prague and with the documentation of the Jewish presence in Bohemia and Moravia. The tens of thousands of negatives, positives, diapositives and the digitally-born snapshots document ritual objects, expositions and objects of the Museum as well as important events in the Museum. One of the most interesting and valuable part of the collection are glass negatives made during the WWII, between 1942 and 1945, which document the confiscation and acquisition of the objects from the liquidated Jewish communities in the "Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia". The Photo Archive holds a collection of photos of many synagogues and cemeteries - many of which didn't survive until this day. Smaller sets of photos relate to the Holocaust, forced labour and the occupation. The collection is gradually undergoing digitisation and will be published here following detailed cataloguisation and verification.

Currently, this online catalogue contains mainly a sample of photos of synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia.

The Jewish Museum in Prague has one of the largest collections of Judaica in the world. The collection was founded in 1906, since when it has continually developed. It now contains almost 45,000 items, including a vast collection of visual art. The core collection consists of objects used in Bohemian and Moravian synagogues, along with works by Jewish artists and artefacts associated with the Shoah that were added after the Second World War. Uniquely, most of the liturgical and household objects come from a single geographical area – the territory of the wartime Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Museum also includes a small number of objects from the Czech border regions (Sudetenland) and from Central Europe. In recent years, the largest number of acquisitions have been genizah finds. The collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague comprises textiles, sbírku metalwork and related materials, sbírku visual art a sbírku manuscripts and genizah papers.